EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: Professor David Bowman is a fire scientist from the University of Tasmania. He has recent first-hand experience in the behaviour of bushfires and how we prepare for them after the January fires in Tasmania that destroyed 400 buildings, including almost 200 homes, a school and a police station. Dr Bowman is a professor of Environmental Change Biology and he joins me now from Hobart.

EMMA ALBERICI: Now, the former Rural Fire Service Commissioner Phil Koperberg says the fire in the Blue Mountains isn't the worst we've seen, but it's certainly the first time bushfires of this magnitude have happened in October. Why has the season started so early this year?

DAVID BOWMAN: The season started early primarily because of the dry spell, the dry winter and the warm temperatures, and that's pre-conditioned a flammable landscape to ignite. And then the last two factors have been the very strong winds and the ignitions, which we saw last week, but as we know, we've had earlier fires in New South Wales and they were sort of warning shots of just how dry and primed this landscape is. And of course it's terribly worrying that we've got these fires starting this early in the season because we've got to get through a summer yet.

EMMA ALBERICI: Are bushfires in October part of the pattern of extreme weather events noted in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

DAVID BOWMAN: Yeah, this question of the fingerprints of climate change is a real - um, the devil's in the detail. The fact of the matter is that there is an enormous amount of variability in fire seasons and the duration of fire seasons. And unfortunately, because the history of Australia, the instrumental history of Australia is very shallow, we've got a very poor ability to discern departures from what we would call historical variability. But I would say that when highly experienced firefighters are saying they're seeing things that are unprecedented, you've got to sit up and listen, because this is exactly what happened in the US when firefighters were reporting very strange fire behaviours in tandem with fire scientists who've got better records in the US who were saying that they were beginning to see the earlier onset of severe fire weather in the fire seasons and longer fire seasons. So, circumstantially, this is very worrying because it is consistent with the climate change signal.

EMMA ALBERICI: Given they have started this early in the season, what does that mean for the summer ahead, do you think?

DAVID BOWMAN: Oh, it's terrifying. The problem we have in NSW is that the only possible thing to quell these fires is going to be not a passage of a front, but a really major soaking rain. Now we could get lucky, maybe some extraordinary ex-tropical cyclone or something come down and douse it. But the reason I'm also very worried is that, classically, the fire seasons move down from Queensland, NSW into Victoria and Tasmania. Our worst month in Tasmania is February, and we saw a fire this year in January. So, you know, it's still green and wet, but because of the desiccating winds and the higher-than-average temperatures, you can take - as last summer was a reasonably benign fire season, and if you pre-condition it with those very - with a heatwave and very strong winds, you can switch what classically would just be a typical fire season, you can ramp it up, as we saw in Dunalley, up into the catastrophic scale where again we were seeing fire behaviours which just - which are just extraordinary.

EMMA ALBERICI: Are there lessons, do you think, could be learned from the inquiry that only just released its report last week into those fires in Tasmania?

DAVID BOWMAN: Absolutely. It's very important when you have major fire events to go back and to work out what works and what doesn't. The unfortunate thing about that inquiry was that there was some confusion about the capacity of fire modelling to provide safety and certainty for the community and unfortunately the inquiry actually sorta swam outside the flags, made claims which were really quite unfortunate and were picked up by the media and resulted in a sense that the Tasmanian Fire Service had failed its duty to protect people and that's very unfortunate.

And we've seen now with these fires the key message is the high levels of unpredictability. I mean, who could've predicted last week the situation we're in now? And the messaging which we are seeing from NSW, the struggle of the messaging because we don't know what's going to happen in the next 48 hours. All we've really got to go on is experience, the fact that there are fires burning in the landscape, and that there are predictions, climatic predictions, of bad fire weather. But nobody and no science can give us certainty about what's going to happen tomorrow and the next day, other than that we've got to be extremely conscious and I commend the politicians and the Fire Service in NSW for managing the messaging. They're not wanting to alarm people, but they're wanting to make it absolutely crystal clear that this is not a game, this is not a game. This is as deadly serious as it possibly can be and I think that message is getting through.

EMMA ALBERICI: Is there a need to rethink the way we build homes and where we build them in bushland areas?

DAVID BOWMAN: Absolutely. I think one of the really bright spots in this catastrophe - we're right in the middle - is that we are able to start having conversations. We've got people's attention and the conversations we have to have is about creating fire safe communities. This is a long-range program. It requires retro-fitting. Our gardens, our houses, our lifestyles, our way we think and feel about the bush. We have a huge amount of learning to do. There is a lot of misunderstanding about the fundamentals of the Australian bush and what it means to be an Australian. We live in an environment that catches on fire and burns and burns and burns and will burn again and we have to understand that and adjust the way we live in this environment. We've got to basically communicate this message in a way that sinks in and makes us proud to be the people who live in the land of fire.

EMMA ALBERICI: And finally, in a recent issue of Nature magazine you wrote an article arguing for the introduction of elephants, of all things, to the Australian landscape as a way of mitigating the bushfire risk. Can you talk us through that thesis?

DAVID BOWMAN: Well absolutely. We know that the megafauna, the giant marsupials, became extinct and there is circumstantial evidence that the loss of these giant animals resulted in changed fire regimes. Now that's still debated, but we certainly know that large animals consume fuel and if you have large animals - not necessarily elephants; we can use goats - if you can consume fuel, it's what I like to call a low emissions fuel management technology. The smoke issue of prescribed burning, the risk of escapes of prescribed burning is forcing a rethink about how we're going to interface communities with bushland. What's happening in Colorado is that because of all of the issues of the fires they're having there, community groups are self-organising and using goats to control fuel. I suspect that we're going to use a bigger range of animals to manage fuel and I think possibly even elephants in some environments. We are going to have to completely re-imagine and open our minds up to whatever strategies are going to work. But the old rusted-on approaches of thinking that a bushfire disaster is all about response and recovery, that's completely over. We now have to embrace change on a massive scale. We're on a massive retro-fitting of our lifestyles and our relationships with fire.

EMMA ALBERICI: Dr Bowman, we have to leave it there. We appreciate your time this evening. Thank you very much.